Cutting Back

by Leslie Buck

  We worked along a wide hillside garden. A building looked up the gently sloping hill, while evergreen trees screened surrounding neighbors. Upon our arrival, I traced a cross over my heart and muttered a few prayers to “His Mostly Ignored” for our safe passage, given Nakaji’s driving speed. The first thing I noticed was a fifteen-foot dead pine tree, completely brown, in the middle of a mostly green landscape. Early in the morning, the men moved as quickly as ants whose hills had just been toppled, surrounding the brown tree with ropes and digging tools. I had to quickly assess the situation, guessing three steps ahead so I was in the right position, with tool in hand at the right time. Working with the men was a codependent’s dream job! The company hierarchy kept the momentum going. No one stopped to discuss a plan. You do as you’re told, or guess and accept the consequences. Kei started up a chain saw. I eyed his traditional boots made of thin, soft cloth near the spinning blade.

  The men grabbed ropes and frantically moved around the pine to pull shrubs out of the way. I attempted to tie away a wide aucuba shrub when Masahiro ran over, saying, “No, no, no!” waving a three-foot rope he held in his hand to let me know he thought I’d used the wrong size. His rope looked too short to circle the shrub, yet obediently I dropped my hand, stood back, and let him tie the shrub his way. Sure enough, his cord failed in length, but he kept trying to tie it in different places, each attempt more unsuccessful than the last. If anything goes wrong while the ants are marching ahead, it throws everyone off, like a multicar freeway crash. With Masahiro’s inability to tie one shrub, everyone else screeched to a halt.

  Toyoka rushed over, yanked the original long rope out of my hand, dangled it in front of Masahiro’s face, yelled at him in earnest, and then tied the shrub exactly as I had intended. I felt triumph wash over me along with a splatter of rain against my cheek. Much to my astonishment, Masahiro turned to me, bowed deeply, and said in the most humble manner imaginable for a sixteen-year-old, “Gomen-nasai, gomen-nasai” (Sorry, sorry). He’d never apologized to me directly before. Sure, I felt more experienced than Masahiro, superior in my gardening knowledge. But he did the most painstaking jobs, worked faster and longer, and never complained: he was a young Japanese craftsman. I still felt like an American pruner who practiced gardening in Kyoto. My intense satisfaction at being right melted into a puddle near his muddy jikatabi. I marveled at how he could maintain such maturity in the face of humiliating failure, with yells coming from every direction. I renewed my vow to obey him when expected, knowing I’d break it soon enough.

  Masahiro climbed the dead pine to tie a rope to its top and then scrambled down. A second later, Kei sliced the base of the tree with his chain saw while the three of us pulled on the ropes, conveniently keeping the tree from falling on Kei. The tree crashed to the ground, sending a thousand brown pine needles in every direction. I said a silent “thank you” that the pine did not fall on my new friend. All this occurred before 8:00 a.m. And Masahiro and I would pile eight truckloads of debris into the bamboo grove in back of the garden before lunch, in the rain. I normally fill my truck bed one time on a California pruning day.

  As the day progressed, Nakaji yelled from various locations as he tried to keep his litter, scattered all around the property, under control. Most of the time, it was raining so hard, his booming voice came across as though over a bad phone connection. There was no real way to stay completely dry. I tried to be strong like the advanced workers and ignore the chilly clamminess inside my suit. I prayed for lunch. Kei began softly singing a variety of Beatles songs. “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,” he sang in tune just out of Nakaji’s earshot.

  Between Nakaji’s booming voice and Kei’s soft humming, I had a little time to consider the design theory of contrasting elements in the garden. I looked around. The advanced pruners were drastically opening up a huge row of backdrop trees on top of the hill, while Masahiro and I tediously sheared long azalea hedges down below. Contrasting elements help heighten drama and direct the eye toward certain highlights in the garden. The choppy backdrop trees might be ignored, which is all the better, as a neighboring building might lurk behind them. But pruning the azaleas into a clean form may draw the eye into the central area of the garden and cause it to hover on the most tended area. If both the azaleas and the backdrop trees were pruned in detail, the viewer would not know where to look. My clients often want all their plants finely pruned. It’s hard to convince them to leave some plants less tended. I ask them to consider a Rembrandt portrait. He painted faces with such detail, one can see wrinkles and creases in the lips. And yet the hair of his sitter might be a thick, dark brushstroke fading into a black background. The contrast in these paintings emphasizes the personality of the sitter rather than a potentially distracting background.

  Backdrop trees I liken to the chorus in an opera. So that we can hear the power of the soprano, the chorus sings more generally as a group. My mom studied opera in her youth and commented, “I respect the chorus. The prima donna could not shine without them. They play an important role, yet with little applause.” In the general pruning of backdrop trees, the art of restraint holds as much importance as skillfully detailing the azaleas.

  Many years after I returned home from Kyoto, Kei came to visit me in my Berkeley Hills home. He offered to prune the California native garden I’d created in my front yard. He spent a few minutes on my California redbud and even less time on a pink-flowering currant, and then devoted three hours to pruning a non-native boxwood shrub off to the left of the garden, hiding trash cans, into a refined rectangle. I’d always just left it general and messy. I asked him afterward, “Why did you spend so much time on that ridiculous hedge when the focus of the garden is the native plants?” He said, “Step back, Leslie. Take a look at the scene. Now that the lines of the hedge are so symmetrical and clean, don’t you notice the wild beauty of the native plants more?” Like a beautiful frame around a naturalized landscape painting, the clean boxwood hedge did make the native scene look more wild and powerful.

  I tried to focus on my azalea hedge while Nakaji’s voice boomed nearby. I thought I’d try Kei’s trick and sang, “There are places I remember, all my life, though some have changed.”

  Nakaji yelled, very close by, “Dame, Leslie, dame!” and I saw him pointing at me from down below. He made a “slice your head off by the neck” hand gesture and pointed to my hedge, I assumed instructing me to lower a particular lump in the hedge to my right. I hesitated, daringly so. I knew I should obey Nakaji, yet I felt that pruning off the sizable lump would create a gaping hole, revealing a bunch of deadwood from the internal part of the shrub. Sure, azaleas sprout back from hard pruning, but I’d never prune a plant so hard that the viewer could see exposed deadwood. If such a reduction was needed, I’d lower the plant slowly, year by year, allowing internal green sprouting to occur until a desired height was reached. I pruned the azalea as far as I dared, with only about a quarter inch of green leaves left to hide a tangle of brittle, dead branches. Still, Nakaji came closer and yelled in Japanese, “Not enough!” He made dramatic hand gestures, motioning for me to cut it lower. I looked at it, and then at him, but held my shears midair. Nakaji stormed off, motioning for me to follow him.

  I ran over to where he stopped, far away from my hedge, near the bottom of the hill, just in front of a large viewing window. He bellowed, “Mite!” (Look!) I took in the scene. At the top of the hill, a long row of generally pruned trees made up the backdrop, and a series of even longer azalea hedges formed the midsection of the garden. Then I saw it. My azalea sat toward the middle of the other surrounding hedgerows. When looked at from afar, it had a big lump in it, unlike any of the other hedgerows surrounding it. It ruined the lovely, repetitive lines of the azalea hedges together. My mentor’s voice popped up, “When deciding how to prune a plant, stand at the viewing point, not the easiest place to stand.” I had failed to remember a basic lesson. I had forgotten that the azalea, and each individual plant in the ga
rden, played a small part in a cohesive scene, viewed from the lower building windows. I also surmised an additional reason the men had choppily opened the thick backdrop trees all morning. On a sunny day, the gaping holes, small from a distance, would fill with dappled light, creating an enchanting effect, like lights streaming down on a stage. Up close, the easiest place to stand, the cuts looked brutal, but from the viewing point, the stubs remained invisible. I returned to my shrub and sliced off its hunchback, creating an ugly gaping hole that was invisible to viewers down below.

  After I’d smoothed out the rest of the azalea shrubs, I proudly ran over to Nakaji, who stood next to a corner of the building, and asked good-naturedly, “Tsugi wa?” (What next?) He pointed to a small area of large, rounded pebbles next to the corner of a building and signaled me to push them aside, rinse them off, and put them back. He liked clean pebbles. The only problem was that the rocks lay beneath a gutter’s spout. In the pouring rain, water flowed out of the spout like a mini Niagara Falls. “Hai!” I’d decided in the span of a few seconds that even if I’d get wet, I’d clean those rocks better than any male Japanese gardener ever could. I concentrated on my task, cursing a little while water poured onto my head and clothing, and continued to work until I worried that everyone had forgotten about me. Nakaji came over near lunch and looked down. I’d dug a two-foot hole, removed dirty pebbles within a large concrete drainage ditch, and built next to me a small pyramid of clean rounded stones. Nakaji looked at the hole, the pyramid, and then me with a startled expression. “Enough!” he exclaimed. “Hai!” I responded, drenched, with a smile, and began filling the hole with the clean pebbles.

  On days when everything seemed like a struggle, I gave myself tidbits to look forward to. As I stood under Niagara Falls, I promised myself, “You can go to the sentō, the Japanese bath, after work. There you will soak in the warm Jacuzzi and sit in the hot sauna!” Further on into my apprenticeship I pledged, “You can read a mystery book instead of studying Japanese” or even, “You can go to your room and cry as much as you want; just don’t do it in front of the guys!” This was my last-ditch effort to keep the men from seeing me cry when I got really frustrated, which happened only twice. I wasn’t even close on that long azalea hedge day.

  During lunch the rain finally let up. While we drank hot green tea and ate lunch, the skies began to clear. I dried my hands and took a moment to show the men photos of my pruning work back in California. They seemed most interested in the two photos displaying my teachers. Toyoka pointed to my mentor, Dennis, standing in front of a group of about fifteen pruning volunteers, and said in surprising English, “He has a shiny head,” noting Dennis’s receding hairline. Everyone laughed. I think this was their way of appreciating someone older and wiser. They took a quick look at my bonsai teacher, white-haired Masahara Imazumi, in his backyard, surrounded by his famous bonsai plants. The craftsmen mused over Mas’s bonsai landscape. “That’s in Japan, right?” I responded, “No, it’s in California!” But they kept repeating the same question. Nakaji asked many questions, and Kei graciously translated, even though I worried he’d rather nap. “Where do your mother and father live? Do gardens in America have Japanese pines? Have you been to the Grand Canyon?” Nakaji laughed at all my responses.

  Despite my desire to spend the rest of the afternoon chatting with the men, at 1:00 p.m. on the dot we got back on the garden track. Nakaji led me to a small camellia shrub and gestured at me to prune it. The deep green plant was only waist high and stretched hardly wider than my hips. As opposed to a thick hedge, the camellia was see-through, but the outline was a bit messy, covered in small, thick, glossy leaves. It was Camellia japonica, the same plant found in gardens all over the United States. Thousands of hybrids have been carefully imported, propagated, and distributed in America for more than two centuries. I’d met a famous Japanese American nurseryman, Toichi Domoto, while pruning old pines on his property with several other volunteer pruning students. Domoto gave a fascinating oral history interview to the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library. But he didn’t talk much the day I met him. He just watched us working on his huge styled pines from his porch chair, in the shade.

  The reason I’ve never forgotten one of the smaller plants I ever pruned in Kyoto is because, besides the pines, this was the first plant I’d been asked to naturally prune by Nakaji. “Sacrifice, and you’ll get the reward,” my Japanese American teacher regularly told us. Perhaps because of my extra effort cleaning the stones under the drainpipe, Nakaji decided to give me a special project. Pruning the camellia allowed me a chance to show off the pruning techniques I’d learned in California.

  There are general pruning tricks to keeping a plant looking natural while styling, such as pruning at intersections of branches bigger than a chopstick, rather than leaving unsightly stubs. Another trick is to prune anywhere along a smaller branch, just above leaf buds, to spur on reactive growth and create a thick hedge effect. Another is to study the poetic version of any given plant or tree at its mature height, untouched. Camellias grow generally in a rounded, mounding form, with strong horizontal branches pulled down by masses of leaves. Camellia branches thin out when mature so that light gently penetrates their canopy. The little Kyoto camellia seemed to sparkle as I reached down, my sharp shears ready to trim its dainty branches. I am not the only one showing sacrifice; trees tolerate quite a bit of risk in allowing me to trim and slice them year after year.

  I pruned only a few branches to lighten the foliage of the little camellia and neaten its rank outline, even when I still left its form naturally undulating. Light penetrated its rich canopy, creating a dappled effect on the leaves and then fell onto the moss below, shimmering.

  My Japanese crew worked so hard and so long for a monthly salary, acting as though life would be unworthy to them unless they displayed a willingness to sacrifice their comfort and time every hour of the day. I completed the shrub in about five minutes and returned to shearing. But I remember the tiny shrub and the effort it took to get to it.

  Toward the end of the day, Nakaji reached a new world record for yelling. Evidently we still had plenty to do. I heard heavy footsteps headed in my direction, and I upped the pace of my pruning shears to a mad frenzy. Nakaji’s voice commanded my attention: “Leslie!” I jumped and looked up to see him glaring at me, pointing to the back of the garden with his amazingly clean white glove. He took off, and I had to run to keep up with him. We came to a group of camellias. My eyes darted around, searching for a problem before the command could be given. Nakaji stood over a camellia shrub with unusually delicate leaves, a half-inch wide, and white flowers with only about five petals to each flower, a single-petal camellia. He snapped off a small-leafed branch with a blossom on its end and held it a half-inch from my nose.

  I’m not blind, you know. I can see it! I thought, staring at the branch. He said, ever so gruffly, in English, “Tea.” I realized then that the branch was Camellia sinensis, whose young leaves are used to make both black and green tea. For years I had been trying, without success, to find one of these plants in East Bay nurseries. Nakaji held the flower not for me to see but to smell. He waved the flower under my nostrils impatiently. I took in a deep whiff. Sure enough, it smelled sweet and familiar, strikingly similar to the Darjeeling tea that he and I enjoyed. “Tabero!” (Eat!) he commanded anew. I obeyed, taking a nibble. Eww, bitter! I had to spit it out fast. Nakaji laughed and laughed, tossing the twig back into the garden. I guess he couldn’t resist his little joke. Camellia sinensis is not edible. We looked into each other’s eyes for a few seconds and smiled. Then I ran back to continue shearing before Bossman could order me to do something else.

  On our way home, Kei told me that Nakaji, who worked just as hard and fast as any twenty-year-old craftsman, was not in his fifties, as I’d assumed. He was actually seventy-three years old! Well. He did act gruff and stiff at times, and also wise and strong. Kei added that Nakaji worked every Sunday in the gardens of his personal clients. My eyes must
have widened at this point in the conversation. Kei looked smug, and I could sense him thinking, “You’ll never fully comprehend the Japanese craftsman.” I decided to skip going to the bathhouse, even though I felt crusted in dried, salty sweat. I walked directly home, my body heavy with fatigue, and fell onto my futon, soon entering a deep, sweet sleep as I did after most long garden days.

  Shearing with Emotions

  I always felt safe with Kei in the driver’s seat. The two of us had been instructed to drive over early to work at a temple, Sainenji, while the other men worked at another project till midday. Kei’s compact features remained still, except for the back-and-forth movement of his head to check the mirrors. I had the unusual opportunity to sit in the front seat, with a panoramic view of Kyoto’s streets. I looked in every possible direction, my torso twisting right and left, sneaking glances at the new man in charge. I wanted to ask a million questions, but I resisted, allowing Kei his concentration and peace.

  I’d lived in Kyoto for two months and had finally begun to feel accustomed to my routine. My muscles felt firmer. Between eating out nightly and using the bathhouse for all bathing, I’d pared down household chores to sleep, breakfast, and lunch prep. I tried to quiet thoughts of casual dinners with Berkeley friends or seeing Taylor on my porch playing the guitar, waiting for me to come home. In general, my heart had sunk into hibernation mode. I enjoyed the familiar companionship of the quiet, hardworking craftsmen. Sharing work with others felt as intimate as sharing words. So with few sentences spoken, I’d grown close to the men. My landlord often got home late, and I enjoyed the silence in my Kyoto house when I got home, as it allowed me to fall asleep quickly. I had little energy to think of anything besides trying to keep up with the craftsmen in the increasingly cool Kyoto gardens.